EDITORIAL - The gall of Mrs Hay-Webster

As we have suggested before in these columns, in a perverse way you can't but admire, and envy, the gall of Sharon Hay-Webster - her capacity to be shameless with an attitude. In her latest iteration, Mrs Hay-Webster assumed the posture of victim with a pouting resignation from the People's National Party (PNP).

Mrs Hay-Webster is one of those parliamentarians who held citizenship of a foreign country and whose right to sit in the legislature has been challenged legally because of the constitutional provision that prohibits membership to any person who is, "by virtue of his own act, under any acknowledgement of allegiance, obedience or adherence to a foreign power or state".

Five members of the governing Jamaica Labour Party were forced out of Parliament because they had dual citizenship with a non-Commonwealth country. In these cases, the members of parliament had either applied for citizenship of foreign countries as adults, or had themselves, after reaching maturity, applied for passports from these countries.

Different case?

Mrs Hay-Webster claims that her case is diffe-rent. She was born in the United States to a Jamaican parent and came to Jamaica as a baby.

She apparently holds a US passport, but says she has never travelled on one. It is not clear, however, if the passport in question is the same one on which she travelled to Jamaica as a baby, or whether she, "by her own act", applied for one in adulthood - which was the basis of Daryl Vaz's disqualification by the courts. He subsequently renounced his US citizenship.

In 2009, Mrs Hay-Webster announced that she had taken steps to renounce her American citizenship. But as a recent WikiLeaks cable published by this newspaper revealed, four days later she snuck back to the US mission to revoke her renunciation.

So, further embarrassed by Mrs Hay-Webster's contortions, the PNP has been attempting to coax her into going. She has baulked, suggesting disloyalty by her party.

No one needs Mrs Hay-Webster to explain that the PNP is heading towards intellectual atrophy and is a shadow of the great institution it had pretence to being.

Selfish ambitions

But that is what she has done with her diatribe about the party losing the "core values of our founder" without realising that her own behaviour, such as her eschewing of deeper values to cling to the seat, has contributed greatly to the party's rot.

We, of course, believe that the constitutional limitation to membership to the legislature by Jamaicans who hold dual citizenship circumscribes the country's use of its best talent. The provision ought to be changed. Until then, though, the Constitution has to be upheld, particularly on those who would want to be legislators.

Mrs Hay-Webster does have a right, as she puts it, to "due process". But her actions appear to be more an attempt to hang on to the seat, rather than a considered moral act. She would, with fanfare, declare her intention to give up her American citizenship, but change her mind and slink back to the embassy to undo the process without a word to the country.

We wonder what Norman Manley, the PNP's founder, and a man of reputed high morals and principle, would make of that.

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